The Gustatory Joys of Farming

I guess you could also call this "quality control". This is my dinner tonight. It's sweet potato and garlic sauteed in raw milk butter with fresh veal cutlet and fries in capers, lime and parsley. Everything came from the farm except for the seasonings for the veal.

As a livestock farmer, there are a few choice items that never make it to farmers market--tongue, tail, testicles & sweetbreads. Being in limited quantity, these items are often highly coveted by gourmands and chefs. Being a hardcore foodie as well as a farmer, these are my great joys and the reward I get for being slobbered on, crapped on, peed on and knocked down in the mud. If you want to enjoy any of these items, the rule is you have to come to my home for dinner. I guarantee dinner will be awesome.

Death Before Breakfast

I'm not one for eating breakfast as soon as I get up in the morning. A few cups of coffee in front of the computer while browsing through email, Facebook, blogs and my favorite newspapers and then I'm ready to head out for what for morning chores.

But after a four a.m. check on my expectant does and a feeding for the bottle babies, I was ready for something to eat a little earlier than usual. I tossed last night's leftover collard greens and roast beef in my cast iron skillet along with half an onion and sizzled away while I suited up for what I thought would be quick morning chores.

Anyone in the Northeast knows that over the last 24 hours Mother Nature dumped a load of snow, sleet and freezing rain making life miserable in general for both humans and animals. And anyone who has raised livestock knows that is a big green light for go-ahead-and-give-birth so I was extra prepared and vigilant in my overnight watch. Ready to head out at a moment's notice, all that was needed was to slip into my coveralls, don boots, hat & gloves and go.

After a treacherous trek across the yard, an inventory at the barn had me believing my morning chores would be smooth sailing and I'd soon be back inside after feeding and watering. No one in labor, no new births and no more wrestling stupid maiden does who didn't want to nurse their kids. Hay and grain went to my horse, hay to Emma, the Jersey cow and hay to the ewe and her kid who had turned me into the Accidental Sheep Farmer a few months earlier. Only there was a problem...the ewe was dead.

You see, not only will animals give birth at the most inopportune time, they will also croak in the worst possible conditions. The ewe was no exception.

It's not like I didn't expect it. She had escaped death four times already by dropping a healthy ram lamb only hours before she was to be slaughtered and in return, she got to live. Keep in mind that when she arrived here, she was the Kate Moss of the sheep world.

Some animals just never thrive. Be it genetic or environmental, no matter how well this sheep had been fed, she always appeared sickly, hence the reason for culling her in the first place. I'm not certified organic and neither is the farm from where she came. Both of us had treated her for parasites with chemical wormers--a last resort--and still she never put on weight or her winter coat.

Nursing takes a lot of energy so when she lambed, I added a few pounds of 16% protein feed to her diet along with a healthy ration of good hay. The lamb grew well, but she continued to deteriorate. After a particularly cold night with a low of 12 degrees, I noticed the ewe had a hard time getting up for breakfast so I went back into the house for the .22.

When I went back to the barn, there she stood chomping away on the flake of hay and nursing her nearly 60-day old lamb. She looked at me and if she could have talked probably would have said, "I'll go out on my own good time, thank you." I walked away with the gun still loaded.

Despite her growing emaciation, there she was every morning ready for breakfast, her lamb in tow punching his muzzle against her bubblegum pink teats.

But not today. No, please, not today. Not in the crunchy, icy mess while my breakfast is warm and waiting for me to fry up a few of those wonderfully fresh and gorgeous green Araucana chicken eggs the Henrys graciously brought me and let their brilliant runny yolks ooze through the collards and roast beef. I was so hungry.

I slogged my way out to the bedded shed where the sheep hung out and sure enough there she was nestled in a bed of straw just far enough out of my grasp to require me to craw through frozen shit to get a good enough grasp on her leg to pull her out.

She may have been a skinny one, but that doesn't mean she wasn't heavy. The crunchy frozen crust on top of the snow created even more resistance. Fortunately, I had the forethought to bring along some baling twine making it easier to pull her body out into the open.

Given the conditions, getting out the tractor was not an option. First, the block heater hasn't been plugged in and even if I did heat it up, once the engine was running the lack of four-wheel drive would have rendered the machinery useless on the snow and ice. That meant manually dragging the body to where it would ultimately rest.

Normally, I compost mortality, but again, that would require the use of the tractor. Additionally, the pile of manure and dirt used to cover bodies was a solid frozen mass. Option number two would have been to bag the body and take it over to the local landfill, but I didn't have any bags big enough to hold her and I'd just taken my allotted load the dump yesterday. Her body would have had to wait for another week.

But most importantly, I thought she deserved better than to be tossed out with garbage. She had given me a healthy lamb and nursed him until he was of a weanable age. She had given me a gift and it was only fair I treat her death with dignity.

Breakfast waited as I loaded her body on to my plastic red sled and trudged through two paddocks down to the towering burn pile. Tomorrow night is the full moon and if there isn't too much wind, the dead wood and the dead ewe will go up in flames together under a watchful lunar eye.

Cure for Winter

Most people store stuff in the attic like holiday decorations, off-season clothing, suitcases, high school year books and old tax records. But I'm not "most people"....
Many years ago in another lifetime, another relationship and another state, I had a step-father-in-law who was Cajun to the core. Among my most prized possessions is the dog-eared copy of Paul Prudhomme's first cookbook, Louisiana Kitchen. By the time it was passed on to me, the cover had long disappeared leaving only the dirty white binding which bore a similar color to the recipe for Dirty Rice. If you stood up the book and let it fall open, it always landed in the same spot--Red Beans & Rice.

If it is one thing I've learned about cooking, regardless of the recipe, is that great ingredients make a great meal. Somehow my red beans never tasted as good as Steve's (although many of my guests would beg to differ). I always wondered why until he told me that there's no substitute for real andouille sausage and a home-cured ham hock, the recipe's staple ingredients along with what is affectionately referred to as the "Louisiana holy trinity"--celery, green pepper and onion.

So when a friend of mine dropped off a tote full of assorted pork scraps from a hog butchering (after reading my blog post Waste Nothing), I was ecstatic to find the hocks as well as a few other choice goodies such as several thick pieces of lard.

The hocks went into a brine and herb solution and there they've soaked for the last ten days. Now they'll hang in my very chilly attic for a few months. The first warm day of spring, they'll have a date with my smoker.

Salt curing has been a method of preservation for thousands of years before the most recent invention of refrigeration in just the last hundred years. Sadly, during that time we've gone from mouth-watering dry salt cured hams to Oscar Meyer bologna rife with nitrates.

But thanks to the resurgence in artisan charcuterie, nose-to-tail philosophy and the realization that oleo will kill you quicker than real animal fat, one of the most sought-after items showing up at farmers market is traditionally cured back fat.

My friends at North Mountain Pastures showed up at the Bloomingdale Farmers Market last season with Lardo and Salo. I did some insanely delicious things with it. One night, I cubed lardo and inserted it into a whole head of garlic wrapped in foil and roasted over a charcoal fire. After that, I was hooked.
Lardo is traditionally made in Italy and is seasoned with fresh rosemary, garlic and black pepper. Being the middle of winter, I had to opt for some dried herbs and crushed garlic left over from earlier in the season.
Similarly, the Ukrainians do the same thing, only it's called Salo. I made my version with smoked hot paprika. When it's ready, I'm sure I'll have no problem getting my Ukrainian pal to sample it...maybe wrapped around some fresh asparagus. That's about the time it will all be ready.

The Off Season

There was an article in the Washington Post today about value-added vendors at farmers markets during the winter months. I found it ironic that a market vendor groused about the market looking more like a food court than a farmers market, but I have to agree with Bernie Prince from FreshFarm Markets when she talks about variety.

But the reality for me is that I cannot sell at a year-round farmers market. As a single woman operating my farm solo, winter is a time I need to stick closer to home. Goats have babies and more importantly, water and food need to be regularly delivered to my livestock. During market season, the animals are on pasture and there's little possibility of the gravity-fed watering system freezing solid.

Plus, I've witnessed firsthand the absolute miserable hell that local producers have gone through on painfully frigid days during winter months just to barely cover their expenses for the day, let alone turn a profit.

While participating in a metropolitan farmers market a few hours from the farm provides a much needed income, it also delivers something equally important---social stimulation, human interaction and cultural experience.

I live in white bread USA where an eighth grade education and the eschewing of electricity is the norm. There are no hipster coffee spots like Big Bear Cafe. Instead, the locals tend to congregate in private clubs like the V.F.W. or American Legion, all thick with the haze of cigarette smoke because they are exempt from anti-smoking laws. The bar scene is not an option anyway since it requires a minimum seven-mile drive to the nearest establishment.

So I sequester myself on my twenty acres with my critters and opt for a simple and quiet time to devote to writing and indoor projects. But there is still the issue of social interaction....Stephanie, a regular at the Mount Pleasant and Bloomingdale farmers markets spends a weekend bottle feeding baby goats while her family skis at White Tail.

Fortunately, some of my metropolitan customers and friends have offered the remedy to this dilemma and I want to take this opportunity to thank them for saving my sanity. They have shown up and graciously helped load hay in the barn and shared in my strange habit of bottle feeding baby goats in the living room. Steve, from NSO, trades his tuba for a tractor.

When I can't go out into the world, I am thankful that the world comes to me.

Sausage Candidates

This is one of the maternity wards. The doe on the left standing on the beam will end up on someone's table soon, guaranteed. Why? See the baby goat on the right? That's hers and she refuses to feed it. So far, I've managed to get colostrum into the kid by holding the doe by the head every few hours and allowing her baby to suckle, but even that has become a challenge as she continually attempts to kick it, step on it, push me around, horn me and even bite me. I'm trying to graft the little doeling to another fresh goat otherwise it will end up as a bottle baby or die.

Welcome to a livestock farmer's version of crop failure.

It's one thing to have a hail storm take out a season of peaches or the deer come through and decimate the soon-to-be-picked lettuce patch for a CSA. I'm not belittling my produce producing brethren, but their crops don't cry.

Nothing is more heart-wrenching that the hungry wail of a baby. But just like there are plenty of bad human mothers, piss poor mothering skills is often the price we pay for domesticated livestock. Look at Holstein cows that routinely need assistance. Heck, they even make calf pulling devices.

Animal rights activists bemoan farrowing crates for sows, but just yesterday I was talking to a fellow farmer who raises pigs. "I'm all for the heritage breeds, but when I did the numbers, I figured out I'd have to wean ten pigs per sow in order to pay for her upkeep and the extra two months of feeding it takes to get the slower growing heritage piglets to slaughter weight and make enough profit to make this work. And the truth is I could be raising pigs on pasture for twenty years and never hit that average. It's just not going to happen."

Therein lies the point...to make enough profit.

I love my goats and I love having goat babies, but the reality is I should be raising them just like beef stockers--buying in a young kids, raising them and then harvesting, similar to how I raise veal calves.

Over the years I've worked diligently to create a rotational browsing system on the farm and culled the breeding does for parasite susceptibility, bad feet and stupidity. But this kidding season is going to take a toll on the herd for stupidity...bad mothers who walk away from the kids as soon as they're born not even offering so much as to clean the mucus from their newborns' faces or who lay on a gorgeous set of triplets smothering them to death despite my hourly vigilance.

On days like these, switching back to my original plans for a fruit orchard or vineyard are mighty tempting.

The Accidental Sheep Farmer

I hate sheep. Ask anyone who has erroneously requested lamb chops from me at farmers market and they’ll tell you my standard response.

“No lamb—I hate sheep. I love to eat lamb and mutton, but I will not keep them on my farm. They’re stupid and greasy.” By greasy, I mean the lanolin that coats their wool and emits that sheepy stench when you handle them. No thank you.

Furthering the irony of my dislike was when I ended up on the cover of the American Sheep Institute’s newsletter last spring when I visited the USDA on behalf of the American Goat Federation and was photographed with the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. My sheep friends thought I had finally hopped the fence.

I love cheeses, ice cream and yogurt made from sheep milk. My Amish friends, the Fishers, milk a flock of sheep not far from my farm. During their milking season, I’ll occasionally head over there right about evening milking time just to watch their very talented Border Collies bring in the ewes from the lush green pastures to the barn were they are milked on a most ingenuous carousel designed and built by John Fisher. The sheep funnel on to the rotating platform where they instinctively lock their heads into a self-catching mechanism to get a brief nibble of grain during their milking. John’s daughters, in their matching black aprons over jewel-tone solid colored dresses, organdie muslin kapps and bare feet massage each ewe’s udder to stimulate milk production prior to attaching the vacuum claws. By the time the carousel has made a revolution, the vacuum claws are detached, a dangling ring pulled releasing the head gate and the ewe ushered down a ramp to a holding pen in the barn stocked with sweet hay.

The Fishers make phenomenal cheeses from sheep and cow milk. I’ve always joked with John about adding goats to his operation to complete the dairy trifecta, but we have a firm agreement between the two of us—he dislikes goats as much as I dislike sheep.

My introduction to caring for sheep came when a friend’s daughter fell suddenly ill and was in critical care for several days. That night, I walked into her barn to find a flock of Cheviots, their whitish bodies with solid lumps of black bulging out of their heads like a tacky alien refrigerator magnet from Area 51.

“Bbbbaaaaaa,” they bellowed at me several octaves lower than that of my beloved goats’ bleating. It just didn’t sound right.

Equally disturbing was the camelids’ fearful humming of a new person in their space without the security of their own shepherdess. I’ve never seen the real appeal of llamas and alpacas having not tasted either of them to date. Maybe it also has something to do with my lack of patience and talent for the fiber arts. I can knit a scarf and that’s about it. Several expensive skeins of yarn are still in my grandmother’s knitting basket waiting for me to gain the patience and ability to knit a pair of socks.

The only species of the Camelidae family I’d ever consider would be a dromedary as I could ride it, milk it and eat it. When it comes to survival in harsh environments, camels are even tougher than goats. I wonder how camels would do in Newburg?

Back to those pasture maggots.

“Hello Sandra, I know you only have goats, but I need some mutton for my son’s aqeeqa. No, I don’t want lamb. My mother-in-law wants meat with some taste. Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you soon.”

I really enjoy dealing with my Muslim customers. They are always gracious and appreciative so when one called with this special request, I agreed to rustle him up some sheep for his firstborn’s naming ceremony.

It was early November and an inopportune time to be culling ewes as everyone’s herds were bred. Slaughtering a possibly pregnant animal is frowned upon and slicing into something with a near-term fetus can be gruesome.

“John, I need a cull ewe for some mutton. You got anything to sell?”

“Sorry, I already culled and what’s left should all be bred.”

On to the next local sheep farmer.

“Daniel, you have any ewes to cull? I need mutton for a Pakistani customer.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I was going to get rid of her here soon before winter. When do you need her?” Daniel’s farm is between mine and the Fishers. We all sold at the same farmers market, too, and have always gone to each other for various livestock items the other may not have had. It’s a good community.

A few days later, Daniel and his son show up with what can only be described as the ugliest sheep I have ever seen. She was a Katahdin, which is a hair sheep that naturally sheds instead of needing to be shorn, but she was in such poor condition that her winter coat never filled in. Refugees from Darfur had more meat on their bones than this sorry sheep.

“Sandra, thanks for finding some mutton. I just wanted to call to let you know the caterer figures he’ll need at least a sixty-pound carcass.”

I was sunk. There was no way this ewe would even dress out at forty. A quick call to my third sheep farmers procured a larger beast to be sacrificed for the party. But what to do with the skinny ewe?

A friend from the city had been asking about learning to slaughter and dress an animal. A quick text confirmed their interest in a batch of Merguez, a spicy north African sausage, but it would have to wait until after my busy season—Eid and Thanksgiving, which fell within the same week again. I hope she lived that long.

“Sandra, my mother-in-law wants more mutton. Can we take that skinny ewe when we come for Eid next week?”

Knowing there’s always something around to make sausage out of, the skinny ewe was promised to its original customer.

It was a busy week with the Eid ul-Adha, the festival of sacrifice which signifies Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. As a livestock producer, I can’t begin to convey how special it is to watch as people pray over my animals before humanely dispatching them.

All week long, Eid customers came to the farm to pick up their goats. Friday was to be the day the sheep went, along with the last of the lambs I had brought in upon request and the last of buck goats. Wednesday was still a market day and I headed out to the barn for a quick check before heading into Carlisle.

I heard it before I saw it. There was a foreign sound emanating from the red shed in the barnyard. At first, I was confused because there were only Eid animals in that pen, which meant intact males…and then I saw it. A huge lamb appeared in the doorway of the shed. Where on earth had she been hiding that thing?

The soccer ball sized udder with two large pink teats poking out the sides on the ugly ewe confirmed the source. They were ushered into the barn and off to market I went, but not before snapping a few pictures to show Daniel.

After setting up my stand, I walked over to Daniel.

“You’ve done something that people have been trying to get me to do for years. Today, you turned me into a sheep farmer.” His eyes grew large before bursting into laughter.

The ram lamb has thrived and is now nearly as big as his mother in height. By Easter, he’ll be perfect. And the ewe? She escaped death on four different occasions so I named her “Lucky”, but chances are good that after the lamb is weaned, she’ll still be sausage….maybe.